Loving Motherhood, and the Next Chapter

Tiffany Masterson was a stay-at-home mum who built and sold her business for $845 million in six years. Listening to her story, one of the things I find most refreshing is how openly she talks about loving motherhood. She has described life with four small children as “heaven.”

That matters. Because so often when successful women talk about their careers, motherhood is framed as an obstacle, an interruption, or something they endured on the way to the “real” work.

For many women, that simply isn’t true. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, it’s exhausting. But it’s also absorbing, meaningful, and deeply fulfilling work. And then, for many mothers, something shifts. As children grow, there is a gradual return of time, mental space, and creative energy.

That was the moment Tiffany recognised. She redirected her focus, conviction and resourcefulness into building Drunk Elephant, one of the fastest-growing beauty brands in history. Just six years later she sold it for $845 million.

Tiffany Masterson, founder of Drunk Elephant, built and sold the beauty brand for $845 million after years focused on raising her four children.

Entrepreneurship can make that kind of transition possible because you can build something on your own terms. You don’t have to wait for someone to offer you a role or an opportunity. But the reality is that most women don’t want to found companies. They want what they’ve already spent years building toward: meaningful, stretching, rewarding careers.

And yet what we see again and again is that when women return to work after having children, they struggle — not because they have lost ambition or capability. If anything, I see the opposite. Ambition evolves. Skills sharpen. Perspective deepens.

What’s often missing are systems and cultures that know how to work with women in this next chapter and help them flourish. Tiffany’s story is extraordinary in scale. But it shouldn’t be extraordinary in structure.

We should expect women’s next career chapters to be rich, expansive and successful — not something they have to fight for, or create from scratch. This is exactly the transition we spend a lot of time thinking about at Branch.

And it’s one I’ll keep exploring here: the stories, reflections and conversations that shape women’s careers before, during and after motherhood.